Most residences in the United States include kitchens with either one or more ovens built in to the kitchen cabinetry, or a range comprising a cook top and an oven nestled in-between sections of countertop. Almost universally, these ovens include a planar flat rectangular door that is connected to the remainder of the oven by one or more hinges mounted on one edge of the door, most often on the bottom edge.
Most typically, an oven door in its open position is horizontally disposed extending outwardly from proximate the bottom of the oven chamber. Accordingly, when the oven is opened to insert or remove food products from the oven, the door projects outwardly from the chamber into kitchen.
On ranges in particular, the oven door is elevated off of the floor only about a foot and is easily accessible by children who can be seriously burned by touching the door's upwardly facing inner surface. Further, children have caused prior art ranges to tip over onto them by climbing onto the open door of the oven. Additionally, a cook must access the oven chamber from the side rather than directly from the front of the oven. If the cook has to reach diagonally across the oven, he or she could lose balance and fall on to the hot exposed inner surface.
In galley-style kitchens, the door, which can project 20″ or more outwardly when open, can effectively obstruct a cooks ability to move unhindered about the kitchen when removing or placing food products in the oven. Accordingly, the placement of an oven in a small kitchen is often dictated by space constraints rather than the optimum location relative to the other appliances and counter space for efficient food preparation.
Despite these drawbacks to the conventional oven door, very few alternative oven and oven door combinations have been proposed. U.S. Pat. No. 6,029,649 and published U.S. Patent application 2003/0146203 both teach generally arcuate rigid doors that slide over a arcuate housing between open and closed configuration, but in order for this oven and door combination to work there must be space above the top (or bottom) of the oven for the door to rotate to the open position. Further and even more disadvantageous, the configuration of the oven's exterior must be cylindrical. In order for such an oven to provide comparable space in the oven chamber as a traditional range or built in oven, the diameter of the oven must be disproportionably large. Given that space is at a premium in most residential kitchens, increasing the size of an oven is not practical. Because of these drawbacks, the ovens of the aforementioned patent and patent application relate to countertop ovens, more commonly referred to as toaster ovens, where the size of the oven chamber is not extremely critical.
Neff, a German appliance company, offers built in ovens and ranges that have a rigid door that opens in a similar manner as conventional doors but once open, the door can be slid horizontally into a chamber located beneath the oven chamber. This oven and door design ameliorates many of the problems of a conventional door when the door is slid into the associated door chamber, but given the extra step necessary to slide the door away and extra time involved in sliding the door away, it is anticipated that most cooks would not bother very often. When the door is not slid away, it presents the same space and safety issues as a conventional oven door. Further, the multifunction hinge mechanism that permits the door to be rotated open and then slid inwardly, is rather complex and more prone to malfunction than a hinge on a conventional door.